Giveaway with Guest Blogger Jeanette Grey

Please welcome author, Jeanette Grey, to the blog today. Jeanette is celebrating the release of Unacceptable Risk and is giving away an e-copy to one lucky person. Just add a comment and talk with us for a chance to win.

A Light In The Darkness

Futuristic fiction seems to lend itself to dystopias. When authors try to imagine the Earth some fifty or one hundred years from now, they often project how all the bad things in the world would tend to just get worse.

Goodness knows I did.

In my new book, Unacceptable Risk, I painted a gritty, dark cityscape, fraught with danger and menace. I took my own concerns about corporate greed and created a world where the rich and powerful had poisoned an entire city in order to reinforce their control and turn a profit. I imagined how, at the current rate at which technology is integrating itself into our lives, we will someday all have cybernetic implants that bring the world wide web straight into our brains – and leave us vulnerable to having our very minds and memories manipulated.

Looking at most of the futuristic fiction out there, it seems like humanity is in for a very bleak future indeed.

But at heart, I don’t believe that to be entirely true.

I believe, no matter how bad humanity’s self-destructive tendencies may get, we will remain creative, resourceful creatures, capable of beauty and love.

I believe in a light in the darkness.

That light seeped into my own dystopian world in lots of little ways. One of my main characters, Edison, collects incandescent light bulbs; in a world of harsh fluorescents, the softer, warmer light is a symbol of hope and a throwback to a simpler time. The other main character, Plix, uses her arsenal of cybernetics to fight against the forces that have tainted their world.

And even when the darkness seems most impenetrable, Edison and Plix find comfort in each other. Because no matter how bleak the dystopia, humanity will always find its redemption in the ability of people to fight for what – and who – they love.

So what’s your favorite futuristic dystopia? And how did your favorite dystopian authors find ways to show that there’s still hope?

About Unacceptable Risk:

Plix spends her lonely, gritty life trying to solve the mysteries her father left behind. Armed with a variety of cybernetic enhancements and a talent for getting into places she shouldn’t be, she searches for clues to his murder—and who’s responsible for poisoning her city.

Waking up on a street corner with her brain wiring fried to a crisp, she figures she must have gotten close this time. There’s only one man she trusts to pull her back from the brink: a tuner who can retrieve the evidence hidden deep in the recesses of her mind. A man she dares not let too close to her heart.

When Edison downloads a secret SynDate schematic from Plix’s burnt-out circuitry, he knows with dreadful finality that nothing—not even the fiery kiss he’s been holding back for years—will stop her from pursuing her quest past the point of insanity.

All he can do, as he helps her plan her final mission, is ease her pain, watch her back…and hope one of them doesn’t pay with their lives.

A former physics teacher, former IT professional and current wife of an engineer, Jeanette Grey has channeled her knowledge of all things science-y into creating futuristic worlds. She then enjoys populating them with imperfect people made more whole through the power of love.

Being as old as I am, I feel as if the future is already here and now. For my particular temperament, and at this particular time in my life I am not able to fantasize about dystopias – it overwhelms me, even when presented as a backdrop for the flame of the human soul. Myself at ebb, I try to fortify myself with stories that create oases of kindness, insight and inspiration so that I can keep my own flame alive. But when I was younger I loved Fahrenheit 451, and Greg Egan’s early stuff (Distress, Quarantine, Diaspora) quite a bit.

In Bradbury’s work, the thread of redemption seemed often related to recollection of a more sane past. I take this as his version of Sacred Time – the time which is outside of ordinary temporal existence and is the repository of memory, dreams and visions, the locus of spiritual reality. For Egan’s stories the hope came from his characters’ dogged persistence in solving the puzzles which were at the center of each story. Very existentialist, but also very biological – as if the essence of consciousness is to persevere and expand into new phase spaces of being. One byproduct of this was that circumstances that are very far from current human experience become, in his stories, “normal”, and just one more new territory to explore. Where, in Bradbury, the stories are a lot about holding on, I felt Egan’s were a lot about letting go. Just goes to show that the “light” can have many faces, I guess.

I understand what you’re saying. Back a few years ago, when I was feeling particularly grim about the state of the world, I didn’t have the stomach for dystopian stories either. It ebbs and flows. Recently, they’ve particularly fascinated me.

Lovely, thoughtful comments on Bradbury. I think I need to revisit him.

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